25 October 2006
Monash University youth and behavioural researcher Dr Peter Kelly claims that the DVD of young Werribee men brutalising a teenage girl reveals something deeply wrong at the heart of a culture that dehumanises people on a daily basis.
Dr Kelly claims that a number of explanations have been offered over the past few days for the degrading, dehumanising behaviour of the group of young men. "None of these explanations offer an excuse for the behaviour. Indeed, there can never be an excuse for this behaviour," Dr Kelly says.
However, Dr Kelly says that many of the explanations are one dimensional and focus on identifying the character flaws of the individual males and their families. "If this was the only incident ever of dehumanising behaviour then this focus on individual character would be appropriate, but it is not."
"While individuals make choices to act in this way these choices are made in social and cultural contexts." Dr Kelly says it is important to ask how social and cultural contexts condition or prepare people to act in ways that dehumanise other human beings.
Dr Kelly points to evidence of cultural contexts that dehumanise people on a daily basis. These include the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the ways privileged boys at the elite Kings School in Sydney brutalised their peers over a long period with a wooden dildo called the Anaconda; media, public servants and politicians redefining refugees as queue jumpers; civilian war casualties being coded as 'collateral damage'; the riots at Sydney's Cronulla beach and the way young, attractive women are portrayed as disposable, ever available sex objects.
"The list could go on and still, in a variety of forums, we seek to demonise the culprits so that they can be punished and we can forget -- until the next incident," Dr Kelly says.
"At different times and in different places human dignity and a generosity of spirit towards others defines us as a culture. However, the Werribee DVD and the behaviour it reveals can present us with opportunities to ask harder questions about ourselves and seek more difficult answers than the easy response that is the fault of a few individuals and their irresponsible families. The question is -- do we, as a community, have the capacities to ask these harder questions?"
For interviews contact Dr Peter Kelly on +61 3 9903 1237.
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